Counseling Seminar on Yap

I have been away from my blog for a few days. This past week was our PIU annual board meeting. I will be blogging about that soon - and I will post some pictures from other February events here too- but I wanted to make a couple more posts about my recent visit to Yap. One of the main purposes of the trip was to accompany Jo Romaniello and Marci Martinelli to Yap so that they could lead a seminar on counseling for several different groups of care providers in Yap. There were about 20 participants in the seminar from the Yap State Hospital, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Department and other Yap government entities. The seminars were coordinated by Jonathan Tamag, a PIU alum, who is now the coordinator for federal programs at the Yap Hospital. In addition Jo did another seminar for various government workers on family therapy and substance abuse issues. You can see more pictures and read Jo's account of the seminars on her blog. I was very happy that PIU could have an opportunity to serve the local community of one of our island neighbors. We are hoping that we will be able to do more of this in the future.

Jo designed the conference to be "hands on" with a lot of discussion, so that it would deal with the issues currently being faced by the counselors in Yap. We got a lot of feedback" that the seminars were very "relevant" and dealt practically with the problems they were seeing on Yap. On the left Marci makes a point in one of the discussions. On the right Jo wraps up the conference assessment.

Jo and Marci also had the opportunity to share with the Yap Church youth group on Friday night. Marci gave her testimony, interspersed with a lot funny stories, and encouraged the young people to talk with each other and their leaders so that they can help one another overcome temptation and become what God is calling them to be.